The international border between the US and Mexico at the San Diego / Tijuana checkpoint is the most trafficked in the world. Approximately sixty million people cross annually, moving untold amounts of goods and services back and forth. A 60 linear-mile cross section, tangential to the border wall, between these two border cities compresses the most dramatic issues currently challenging our normative notions of architecture and urbanism. This trans border ‘cut’ begins 30 miles North of the border, in the periphery of San Diego and ends 30 miles South of the border.

We can find along this section’s trajectory a series of collisions, critical junctures, or conflicts between natural and artificial ecologies, top down development and bottom-up organization. It is in the midst of many of these metropolitan and territorial sites of conflict where contemporary architectural practice needs to reposition itself. In other words, no meaningful intervention can occur in the contemporary city, without first exposing the conditions, political and economic forces (jurisdiction and ownership), that have produced these collisions in the first place.

ABOUT TEDDY CRUZ

Teddy Cruz was born in Guatemala City. After earning the Rome Prize in Architecture and obtaining a MDesS-1997 at the Harvard GSD, he established his practice in San Diego, California in 2000. He has been recognized internationally for his urban research of the Tijuana-San Diego border, and in collaboration with community-based nonprofit organizations such as Casa Familiar, for his work on housing and its relationship to an urban policy more inclusive of social and cultural programs for the city. In 2004-05 he was the first recipient of the James Stirling Memorial Lecture On The City Prize, by the Canadian Center of Architecture and the London School of Economics, and in 2008 he was selected to represent the US in the Venice Architecture Biennial. He is currently an associate professor in public culture and urbanism in the Visual Arts Department at University of California, San Diego. 

This talk is a part of the Interdisciplinary Seminar at the Cooper Union School of Art. The lectures and seminar are organized and led by Doug Ashford and Walid Raad.

This talk took place on March 23, 2009.
For more information on the Interdisciplinary Seminar go to http://cuids.org

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